Starting a Dissertating Blog!

No, I never meant to quit blogging. I just needed some excuse to write more about work and academic stuff. And to separate out my life from my work. This blog will be dedicated to chronicling my rudimentary ideas as they develop and recording bits and pieces of observation and information pertinent to the dissertation. My advisor has said to me, a couple of times by now, that “[my] dissertation is going to be MY BABY!!!” (We’re both childless women. And although it is a bit deflated, all written out like this, it was truly awe-inspiring when she said it in person.) So I guess this blog is in a way a pregnancy journal. From impregnation to childbirth. Nurture and grow the baby.

I’m in a dissertation workshop provided by the department over the summer (just 6 meetings over the summer; we’re not that gung ho). The two supervising professors want the draft of the dissertation proposal by July 10. That’s tomorrow. I’ve whipped out a rough draft, really rough, and am ready to engage in extensive revising in the remaining weeks of the summer. While it is hard to put down an argument and a conceptual frame for the dissertation, it’s also fun. It’s like designing a house. With rooms for various purposes. And the most fun part is that you get to do whatever you want to do as long as you abide by the construction rules.

I received the conference program for the Tepoztlan conference a couple of days ago. I was worried about the conference when I was thinking about the hastily-put-together paper, but now I’m more excited than anything else. My paper is on a panel aptly titled Deseo y Diaspora. I love the title of the panel. It’s exactly what the paper is about. For those of you interested in the conference program, it’s available online here. For some reason I’ve been put on two panels as a “dominatrix” (who knows what that’s supposed to mean) instead of one. All the other graduate students I’m going with each got one panel to dominate over. I think the person who wrote up the schedule must have made a mistake and put me down twice instead of once. I’m debating whether I should email the person and let him/her know–umm, I really don’t want to do double the work, you know–or whether I should just let it slide–how much more work can it be anyway?

The conference is run in the form of a workshop series. It’s meant to avoid a few celebrity academics dominating the floor and to guarantee “equal” representation of the participants. It also means that there’s more reading to do before the panels–since you have to have read all the papers on the panel and be ready to discuss what you have read–and that you have to submit a research paper well  in advance of the conference. True democracy demands civic responsibility. But think about all the cool people I’ll be able to get a glimpse of! And all the scintillating conversations that will take place! Too bad I don’t have Spanish fluency. Oh, well, I’ll have to make do with English.